Process Bliss helps Urban Planters to scale sweetly

Despite its impressive growth, the passion that sits at the heart ofUrban Planters – where its people love plants, love what they do, and love the customers they serve – has remained the same. Knowing it needed to transform to support this sustained growth, Process Bliss enables Urban Planters to scale with ease; allowing people to just get on while supporting the overall business strategy, managing core processes while enabling continuous improvement, and simply integrating with ‘business-as-usual’.

Background

It’s come a long way from its roots; five years ago Urban Planters was selling plants in pots to facilities managers in a bid to make office environments more visually appealing. But with a strong scientific link established between the impact plants have on wellness at work and employee behaviour, the business has gone from strength to strength – now engaging HR departments directly to help them improve the working environment, and growing beyond pots, to a multi-service offering including living walls, plant art and Christmas displays.

The challenge

While the success that Urban Planters has experienced is the envy of most SMEs, it does come with its challenges.

Growing pains

As Urban Planters has scaled through organic growth, it has hired new talent and invested in different IT systems. But in time, this organic growth becomes challenging as the internal infrastructure simply doesn’t exist to support a business of this size and is no longer fit-for-purpose. And that means that senior management are increasingly distracted from their main roles.

Poor productivity

With the whole company reacting to factors that were affecting their business – whether it be a new order through the website, solving a customer’s issue, or excess stock perishing while sitting in storage – Urban Planters wasn’t able to plan for success, and therefore not operating in the most efficient, productive way.

Inconsistent customer journey

Embarking on a productivity drive, Urban Planters knew it needed to create the internal processes necessary to guide its operational efficiency. A big part of this is ensuring the customers receive a more consistent service, by taking them on a journey that demonstrates Urban Planter’s passion, helps them understand the science behind ‘greening’ a workspace and rationalises the investment. But achieving this requires all employees to remain compliant with the overall brand standards to deliver that consistency.

Currently on a productivity drive, Urban Planters has a number of initiatives running in parallel that will see the business transform over the coming months. A key element in the strategy is to use Process Bliss to help facilitate these initiatives.

“I very much subscribe to the Richard Branson way of thinking – that if you look after your staff, everything else looks after itself. Seeing Process Bliss I knew everything in my business would run pretty sweetly because the product is built with people at its core.”

The Results

Free to get on with activities that add value

Like many entrepreneurs, Rory’s first skillset lay elsewhere. As well as being the managing director, day-to-day he’s also the leader of a sales team who take care of a territory that now spans most of the south of England.

“With Process Bliss, I think I can get to a place where I have a light touch in the overall running of the business, and I am released to do sales all day long. Being free to concentrate on the bits I really like doing, and the things I’m best at, will ultimately give a better result for the company.”

Supporting strategy

Using Process Bliss as part of its initiative to re-define its strategy, will enable Urban Planters to better support its senior leadership team when implementing the Entrepreneurial Operating System® (EOS).

“It’s interesting to see how Process Bliss supports us with the EOS®. Not only do we use the system to run our fortnightly meetings, but if process-orientated issues arise, we fast-track them directly into Process Bliss, which is really supporting our productivity drive.”

Effectively managing core processes

It’s the core processes that determine the blueprint for how the organisation operates and delivers a consistent experience. For Urban Planters, managing stock is central to its success. Dealing in live plants, they need looking after to stop them deteriorating, and some plants will perish quicker than others. There’s a high potential for wastage if the process isn’t right, covering steps such as reconciling/replacing stock or ‘just in time’ production.

“Process Bliss helps us to get our hands more tightly around stock management. It’s been a constant challenge in our business, but by identifying all the steps in the process and writing them down so they are more visible means they’re followed by everyone. As our business continues to consolidate into fewer, larger territories, retaining greater control over stock management is a business priority.”

Enabling continuous improvement

But you can’t control people and force them to do things a certain way. Regardless of how big the company has grown, there’s a passion that sits at the heart of the business, where the people simply love plants, love what they do, and love the customers they serve.

“One thing I really liked about Process Bliss is that the processes aren’t set in stone. The team has some pretty savvy people who I know will find better ways to do things as we go along. Knowing that Process Bliss encourages collaborative working to ensure continuous improvement is really important.”

Integrating with the business

Embarking on an initiative to update its current website and intranet, Urban Planters is looking to converge its IT systems. This will create a more joined-up way of working that allows its employees to just get on with the job in hand.

“Through its simple integration, Process Bliss will plug seamlessly into the new IT engine, creating a tool that is genuinely useful to our people, while ensuring all our standard forms are completed as part of the process.”

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